On the rare occasion that you heard him speak, he was never animated and his voice was pure monotone-the kind of thing that could put the most restless baby to sleep. His mousy brown hair matched his dull brown eyes, and his weak chin completed the bland lines of his roundish face. At five-feet-ten he was neither tall nor short. There wasn’t a single physical characteristic about him that was memorable. At first Rapp didn’t know what to think of him. They’d known each other for sixteen years. Joe Rickman was the most cunning and brilliant operative Rapp had ever worked with. Langley had even taken the unusual precaution of buying the houses on each side and moving in the bodyguards and their families.
LAST MAN SITTING DOWN WINDOWS
All of the windows were bulletproof Plexiglas and the high-tech security cameras and sensors were concealed so as to not attract the attention of the neighbors. The simple-looking front door contained a one-inch steel plate and a reinforced steel frame. The cinderblock wall that surrounded the property was coated with a special resin designed to prevent it from exploding into a million pieces and shredding the house in the event of a car bomb. There were quite a few upgrades that made it unique, but from the outside it looked dingy and run-down just like all the other houses in the neighborhood. The house looked like your run-of-the-mill two-story blockhouse in Jalalabad. Langley didn’t want any official records of the comings and goings of the drug dealers, warlords, arms dealers, local politicians, police, and Afghan Army officers who were on the take. This was a black site where the more unpleasant aspects of the war had been coordinated. There was no American flag flown out front and there were no snappy Marines standing post at the main gate. He’d never seen an impregnable safe house for the simple reason that people had to come and go.Īs with most CIA safe houses, this one was intentionally bland.
LAST MAN SITTING DOWN FULL
Rapp had told those same experts that they were full of shit. Four years earlier they had claimed the safe house was impregnable against any threat that the Taliban or any other local group could come up with.
According to the experts at Langley this was never supposed to happen. Whoever had attacked the safe house had the knowledge and skill to hit the place without setting off a single alarm and alerting the quick-reaction force less than a mile away at the air base. The backup connection through the satellite dish on the roof had also been disabled. The perimeter security had been breached phone line, cameras, motion sensors, heat sensors, and even the pressure pads had all been taken off-line. The early signs pointed toward a well-coordinated assault. Rapp set the troubling thought aside for a second, tried to imagine how it had gone down.
LAST MAN SITTING DOWN CRACKED
There was nothing about this mess to give Rapp any assurance that things would be fine, but this last little twist cracked open the door on something he did not want to consider. 45 caliber with ammunition that pancaked and tumbled for maximum damage. The exit wound told him the man had been shot by something a lot bigger than a 9mm-probably a. A quarter of his face was now a jagged crater of flesh, blood, and bone. He’d been shot through the back of the head. The fourth Afghani was a different story. The next two bodyguards looked the same, including red pucker marks in the center of their brows. One bullet, nice and neat-the way Rapp would have done it. The bearded face, the dark, lifeless eyes, and the dime-sized bullet hole that marked the center of the man’s forehead were all expected.
Mitch Rapp started with the one on the left. THE four dead men were lined up on the living room floor of the safe house. With white-knuckled twists and turns, The Last Man proves once again that Vince Flynn “is a master-maybe the master-of thrillers in which the pages seem to turn themselves” ( Book Reporter). With the Taliban, Iran, Pakistan, and Russia all vying for a piece of the war-torn state and the FBI dispatching their own special agent to investigate, Rapp is facing his most difficult assignment yet. When he’s ordered to find Rickman, no matter the cost, Rapp knows his mission will be an exceptionally dangerous one. When he suddenly goes missing, the initial assumption is kidnapping, but Mitch Rapp knows certain things about his old friend that gives him pause. Joe Rickman has spent the last eight years running the CIA’s clandestine operations in Afghanistan, working with every disreputable figure in the Islamic Republic. #1 New York Times bestselling author Vince Flynn “has never been better” ( The Providence Journal) in this high-octane thriller following Mitch Rapp as he searches for a missing CIA asset, whose disappearance puts Rapp’s own life at risk.
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